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2009 Quote a Day Calendar

I have always loved to collect intangible things. One of my favorites collections consists of opening lines of great novels. Who can forget “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . . ” Or “Call me Ishmael.” My all-time favorite opening line comes from Pat Conroy’s Prince of Tides: “My wound is geography.”

But lo, I digress. By far my largest stash of immaterial things are the countless quotes, words of wisdom, poems, and pithy sayings I have collected over the years. I have a library card catalog filled with hand written 3×5 cards with quotes accumulated from the days before computers had entered my life. In the intervening years I have made several vain attempts to catalog my precious to no avail. The first installment came and went in a HyperCard stack that is long gone. A Microsoft Access database of pearls of wisdom sits unused on an old Windows machine somewhere in the house.

Every fall I get the half-baked idea to make one of those “Page-a-Day” calendars filled with my own favorite quotes. I have yet to undertake the arduous task of selecting, formatting, printing and binding 365 of my favorite sayings. However, this year I will avail myself of this space to “catalog” some of my favorite quotes here at It Seems To Me.

Sometimes I will comment on why the quote was important to me or where my head was at the time. Other times the quotes wills stand on their own. Feel free to join in the conversation.

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  • We just decided to go

    From now on, we live in a world where man has walked on the moon. And it’s not a miracle, we just decided to go.

    — Jim Lovell

    There is a scene in the movie Apollo 13 in which astronaut Jim Lovell is hosting a dinner party at his house. At some point in the evening he escapes the hubbub of his guests and takes a seat in a lawn chair in the back yard. When someone comes out to join him he utters the phrase above.

    The moon landings were the culmination of a gargantuan series of tasks. Thousands of people invested hundreds of thousands of hours coordinating and delivering on thousands of tasks. It wasn’t a miracle that we landed on the moon. We just set our minds to it and decided to go.

    Theme of the week: Just decide to go.

  • Go away, I’m looking for truth

    The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away, I’m looking for truth,” and so it goes away. Puzzling.

    — Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

    I actually sent this quote to an internal recruiter once. I had been through several interviews with the company and it seemed that I was progressing towards a job offer. I was excited about the company and it looked to me to be a very good fit.

    And then came that one final interview with one of the partners. Within the first fifteen seconds of our conversation I knew that an offer would not be forthcoming. It was clear that she had already made up her mind before the call even began. When the recruiter called a few days later to say that the firm had decided to not move forward I was deeply puzzled.

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